Missing TOTAL line in report when omitting all but one file

[Hisol]

When I run coverage and omit all files bar the one file I am interested in, the report output does not include the TOTAL portion of the report or the separator.

This is therefore breaking the CI scripts that are being used to report on coverage.

If there are 2 files present after the omissions, then the separator and TOTAL rows are returned in the report.

[nedbat]

It seems redundant to have a total line for just one file. Can't the CI scripts just look for the last line of the report?

[Hisol]

Sorry for slow reply, lost in my email :/

Having the total line makes it consistent in all use cases. With the current setup adding an extra file or removing enough files to switch between 1 or 1+ files in the output would also require going and changing the CI scripts each time or potentially weird outputs/errors. More timed spent tweaking scripts etc.

Be nice if the output was simply consistent regardless, or if there was an option at least to force the total for people who want that consistency.

[nedbat]

I think a text scraper can still just look at the last line of the report, with a total or not. But in the long run, I'd rather support your use-case with a true machine-readable format.

[Hisol]

Totally it can, but it's more faffing about with CI scripts that IMHO should be only tweaked on occasion. In my use case it was picking up earlier output which included a TOTAL line and I didn't spot the reason why the figures didn't match until I went looking though the workers output.

For me it also says that the script finished without issue, I have used plenty of software that has silently died at some point but you couldn't really tell without knowing some output was being missed.

I guess I just like things to all look the same and not change without user specifying they want changes in the options.

[languitar]

Just to add one more hint to this: Gitlab only supports regular expressions for parsing the generated output. Without the TOTAL, creating a working regular expression is pretty hard.

[nedbat]

Now with #1091 merged, the TOTAL line is always output.

[nedbat]

This is now released as part of coverage 5.4.